Papurau Newydd Cymru

Chwiliwch 15 miliwn o erthyglau papurau newydd Cymru

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INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS.

Newyddion
Dyfynnu
Rhannu

INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS. Is it true that the world has never known its greatest men ? Have all its benefactors been ignored and despised or, rather, have not some occasionally found timely recognition and fitting reward ? Every new invention has had its own special fight before it could get its hearing. Who recognises the prince in the beggar ? Who sees the full-fledged eagle in that ordinary and somewhat unprepossessing egg? Who could always foietel that the new invention, untried and un- proved, was a world's blessing in disguise, an embryo helper forward of humanity ? Besides, every inventor has not been wronged by his generation: some have, and most grievously, but not all. In proof of this position we abridge from All the Year Hound the following interesting retrospect of the struggles and rewards of genius We will follow the course taken by Mr. John Timbs, in his new book, "Stories of Inventors and their Dis- coveries and, for every persecuted benefactor of society, we will find at the least two who met their re- ward. We begin with Archimedes, as of course. For, though the Pyramids were built, and the monoliths raised; though the huge caves of Elephanta and the City of Petrcea had been hewn out of the living rock, and the Pelasgians—or who ?—had built their Cyclo- pean walls wherever they had had the chance, yet Archimedes always stands first on the list of mechanical discoverers, as if the world had never known crank or pulley till he made both, and had never raised a stone bigger than a man's hand. But we must not forget that Archimedes stood upon the shoulders of the past. Well! Archimedes was no martyr. His Eureka, his boast about the world and the lever, were household words in every Greek mouth; his screw is one of the principal motors of the present day and his catapults and burning-glasses, his balistse and the Galley of Heiro received their due honours then, and remain unsurpassed even yet. The Great Eastern is not equal to that Galley of Heiro, with its temples and its baths, its storehouses, water tanks, and six hundred A.B.'s sitting down to fish and flour in the forecastle. Honoured by his sovereign, respected by the people, revered by posterity, the ghost of brave old Archimedes, wandering palely on the banks of the Styx, has no reason to complain of the injustice of humanity. No one was hung, drawn, or quartered for the magnet; only Columbus, when the needle varied in the American Atlantic, had to improvise a theory to save, perhaps, his life from the mutinous hands of his terrified sailors. Whether the Chinese, to whom the honour of the discovery belongs, have a martyr mag- netiser, like their martyr potter Pousa-now a god, or something like it-we do not know but, according to all accounts, their Magnetis Mountain, which played Sindbad such a sorry trick, has made martyrs and victims enough. Printing made a marty r, in a small way, of poor Guttenberg, who, what with debt (he spent the whole of a large private fortune in bringing his moveable blocks to perfection), political frays, the ill-will of the priests, and the enmity of the guild of writers, had but a troubled life of it. But though he was persecuted, and though Faust was held as nothing better than lieutenant and vice-regent of the devil, all the early printers were not so reviled. Old Caxton was honoured as he deserved; and cost the parish good hard money for the iiij torches, and the belle used at his bureying." Guttenberg's small napkin-press-like printing machine has been slightly distanced now by Applegarth's machines of eight cylinders, which print twelve thousand impressions of the Times per hour; by Messrs. Hoe's of ten cylinders, which print twenty thousand in the hour; and by that other American monster, which can print twenty-two thousand double impressions in the same time. Little did the good old German philospher and enthusiast dream of where his invention would extend when he first hewed out his wooden moveable blocks. Of gunpowder and its discoverers we need not speak. It has had its martyrs by the million, and is altogether too ferocious a compound for us to meddle with. Torricelli and Pascal, Reamur and Fahrenheit, with their barometers and thermometers, are pleasanter subjects to consider; so is Guericke, with his air-pump; so are all the inventors of the various diving-bells, by which human beings can go down among the sea- nymphs and the coral-roots, and crawl through the mazes of brown, green, and purple weed, growing in tufted bowers among the arches of the wrecks. The latest of these diving-bells is the American Nautilus, where the ballast or descending power is water, and where the air for breathing is condensed. This Ameri- can Nautilus seems to be about the greater succ ss yet made in the diving-bell department, allow len to remain underwater longer than any other cor nee hitherto devised, and with less risk of acr.ien or suffocation. For the race of automata we confess to little absolute sympathy; though, relatively, both as furtherances to the science of pure mechanics, and as examples of skill and ingenuity, they are not without considerable ilne. They are among the earliest and most universal crea- tions of man. India, China, and Japan, all have them in some or other form Egypt and Greece both dealt largely in them for their mysteries and initiations. Then there were various and sundry automata in the Dark Ages. Well! of these mechanical inventions, excepting the questionable reputation that clung round Albertus Magnus, and the unhappy fate of Alex, there are none to whom an indiscriminating public showed marked ingratitude; while, in later days, fame, honour, and riches have heaped themselves up in overwhelming piles, on the heads of those who have showed inventive talent or mechanical skill. We, the advocates of hu- man nature as a whole, are glad of this, as confirmatory of our own theory. There is no use in talking of the various schemes for aerial ships, or of the thousand and one balloons that have been sent up on new principles, and with perfect good faith that each of those new principles was going to inaugurate a, new era in our navigation. Perhaps aerial ships will be actual, commercial, and trading facts, before long; perhaps the London General Balloon Company will take the place of the London General Omnibus Company, with stations on the roof-tops of certain accommodating British householders. Except- ing the martyrs of the experiment, beginning with Icarus and ending with his American imitators of the other day, aerial navigation has not been a very ill- used pursuit. To be sure, people do say that they are all cracked who think it can ever be made of positive every-day use but then every new thing has been a sign of madness from time immemorial, and there is no reason why this new thing should be exempt. Roger Bacon and the Marquis of Worcester were both thought to be mad when they foreshadowed steam-engines and telescopes; Paracelsus was evilly looked on for the sake of his new drug, opium; and Napier of Merchiston, when he asserted that he could set ships on fire by a burning-glass, sail under water, by help of a certain machine destroy thirty thousand Turks without the risk of losing one Christian, manure profitably with common salt, and calculate by logarithms, was held as little better than a maniac, if not a wizard, which was worse. Rupert and his experiments fared better. But then Rupert was a prince, closely connected with the blood royal, and royalty in those days meant something more than taking off one's hat, or standing while the national air was played. Rupert did many noticeable philosophic things, fiery soldier of fortune though he was: he brought forward Van Siegen's invention of mezzotint, made the toy called Prince Rupert's drop's, which no one can rightly explain even now; blew up rocks and mines under water, made an hydraulic machine, improved the naval quadrant, made glass at Chelsea, cast hail-shot, and devised the useful metal since called "Prince's metal." He worked luxuriously at Windsor Castle, of which his cousin Charles the Second, appointed him governor; and there in his apartment swords and crucibles, rapiers, retorts, spurs, and mathematical instruments lay scattered all about in a confusion befitting his multiplex life. The first watchmaker was a great man. Was he accused of witchcraft, and burned at the siake for tampering with the mysterious laws of life and motion ? We do not know he might have been. And John Harrison of Faulby, the country carpenter's uneducated son, and the maker of the first marine chronometer, was a great man too; and he did not suffer by his in- vention. Quite the contrary; for he got twenty thou- sand pounds for it, when, after forty years' incessant labour, he had fully perfected it, and made it the reliable creation that it is now. No, all the inventors and discoverers have not suffered. True, Columbus was ungratefully treated, and Galileo knew (under a dominant priesthood) more of the superstition and cruelty than of the recognition and gratitude of men but all have not been so evilly handled. To William Hervey no one has grudged honours, though to be sure poor Servetus was burned, partly, for disproving the theory then existing that the veins carried the blood to the various parts of the body, a disproval afterwards confirmed by Harvey. Dr. Jenner has his statue and his colleagues, and rewards were not wanting in his r, lifetime. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had a harder fight to go through than fell to his lot, and yet she was victorious in the end. To Newton and Herschel, Lord Rosse and De Yerrier, to Njepce, Da,guerre, Fox, Talbot and Wheatstone, Brewster and° Davy, the world owes great and glorious benefits but we never heard of any disposition to repay those benefits with ingratitude. So, after all, men and women are not so bad as_ it sometimes suits bystanders to say, and humanity is of smoother skin than the cynical will allow. i, Was not >Vatt honoured? Did not George Stephen- son find backers, friends, and disciples? Did not Arkwnght, the Bolton barber, make a colossal for- tune ? And what would be the Peels and the Marshalls, the] Hargreaves and the Cromptons, if their ancestors had not been inventors ? Ah, well! humanity has some- thing to answer for here for the machinery inventors the men who have made straps and wheels and pulleys do the work of living thews and sinews, have seldom got well off in the outset. They interfered with exist- ing rights, with a man's vested interest in his own muscles, and consequently had every working hand dead against them, at all events for a time, and until the sum of comparative advantage was pretty clearly made out. Hargreaves, the inventor of the spinning- jenny, died at Nottingham in great poverty and distress; Crompton's mule was taken to pieces for safety against the mobs, wairing and raging against all new-fangled machinery; Cartwright was defrauded the elder Peel had his carding-machines broken, and was finally driven out of the country where he lived; Jacquard, the great benefactor of all figure-pattern weavers, made no fortune by his invention, but left his family in such poverty that they were obliged to offer for sale the golden medal which Louis the Eighteenth had given him. The Chamber of Commerce at Lyons generously bought the medal, and gave twenty-four pounds for it—being exactly four pounds more than the intrinsic value of the gold! Earlier than alhhis, we find Lee, the first stocking-weaver, dying in Paris, heart-broken by poverty and disappointment; while later, John Lombe is poisoned by the Italians, whose secret of silk-weaving he stole and transplanted into England. No the history of machine inventors is not, on the whole, satisfactory; for we rarely find that those who originated an idea got anything by it except- ing persecution and hatred, while all the great fortunes made have some slight taint or other in some out-of- the-way corner, where only the most prying and impolite of biographers would think of looking. Even the highest names are not quite stable, and in the most portly bankers' books may be found a few dog's-eared pages with a smirch and a stain over the larger figures. Street gas-lighting had a hard day of it once, when a committee of the Royal Society, appointed by Government, met to decide on its merits. It was almost hunted to the death then, and tossed over to the kites and crows. Brougham, Davy, Wollaston, and Watt, were all dead against the pos- sibility of such a plan. Brougham bitterly ridiculed Accum the chemist, and one of the upholders and believers in the idea; and Sir Humphrey Davy asked, with a scientific sneer, if the dome of Saint Paul's were to be taken as a gasometer ? Frederick Albert Winsor and their scheme stood their ground and after the due and proper amount of badgering which such an innovation must expect, the point was gained, and London was lighted with gas. This was in 1825; though the first triumphant experiment of lighting Saint James's Park had been made three years earlier, namely, in 1822. But we have not come to the end of street-lighting: yet; though, indeed, nothing has hitherto been dis- covered which can satisfactorily supersede coal gas. But it has to come, being among the future "destinies" of science. The patent air-light (from hydro-carbon mixed with atmospheric air) cost thirty thousand pounds in the experiments which were made, to see if it would do better than gas-but it failed and though the lime ball, the Bude, and the electric lights, are all flaming successes themselves, they are all too expensive for the open streets and public buildings. Still we may be sure that street-lighting, like many other things, is in its infancy, and that, when it comes to maturity, it will be widely different to what it is now. The question is stirring, evidently. We hear of sundry chemists poring over all sorts of calculations and analyses, preparatory to setting the world in a blaze with a new light; we may rest assured that our gas-lamps will be blown out, and some new-fashioned flames take their place. It is the way of the world-the way by which all inventions have fought, risen, culminated, and gone out, when a better thing has been discovered.

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